Undercover Authorship

The above image by Tim Burton expresses the young animator's frustration at the Disney Studio's insistence on conformity and determination to force individual talent into pre-set expectations. If you wanted to work at Disney in the 1980s, then you had to obey the strict rules of what constituted the 'Disney Brand'. Burton's unique style did not suit the studio much at all (though, given that fact, he did do rather well out of them - being able to make the decidedly un-Disney shorts Vincent, Frankenweenie and Hansel And Gretel) and he eventually left to pursue his own artistic agenda. This panned out quite well for Burton himself, but also rather well for Disney in the long-run, who have made a fortune out of Nightmare Before Christmas and have repeatedly tried to entice Burton back to put his own stamp on their established properties (successfully with Alice In Wonderland, unsuccessfully with Maleficent). Another frustrated animator with artistic dreams that ran against the grain of 80's Disney was John Lasseter, who likewise left Disney to follow his own star, only to find that that star brought him right back to making money for Disney again.

In both cases, individuals with a clear artistic stamp were forced out of the studio for not conforming to the status quo and were only incorporated back into the fold once their idiosyncrasies had proven themselves out in the real world. But what about those that were left behind? The other Disney animation directors of the 1980s that managed to toe the line and produced material that the studio executives were happy with? Were they in some way less artistically-minded? Did they simply keep their heads down and get on with what they were told?

I shan't try and offer up an overview of the people at work in Disney during the decade, but what I will do is look at the films of John Musker and Ron Clements in the context of 'authorship'. When we look at their filmography, we're struck with how mainstream it appears to be - you can't find another pair of directors from this period with as successful a track record as these two. The Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules, Treasure Planet, and The Princess And The Frog - each would seem to be 'Disney movies' first and foremost, providing us with all of the things that we would expect from the studio rather than any individual person (or persons). But when we look closer we can see a pattern of elements in their films that link them into a unified whole. It's not that these elements are missing from other Disney films, but no-one else combines all of these particular elements together in the way that Musker & Clements do.

While the previous post on Burton explored the concept of authorship largely in relation to aesthetics - the look of the films - with Musker & Clements we need to focus on the narrative structure and themes to see an authorial pattern. First off, the cast of characters; Musker & Clements movies will nearly always feature a hero/heroine, a love-interest, two comical sidekicks and a villain. At first glance, this might appear to describe any Disney cast, but bear with me. The hero/heroine and love-interest are of least interest here, not only do we find them in the majority of Disney films, we also find them in 95% of all Hollywood films. The other two categories are slightly different, though. All Disney movies have comic relief characters, but Musker & Clements have a particular affinity for the 'removable double-act' - two characters whose role is mainly to communicate with one another, rather than to contribute much to the plot. We can easily take Sebastian and Flounder out of The Little Mermaid and it will have little bearing on the way the narrative pans out. The same goes for Abu and the Carpet in Aladdin, Pain and Panic in Hercules, or Louis and Ray in The Princess And The Frog. Now, of course, it's not that these characters contribute nothing to proceedings, but that their roles (if any) are largely functional and could be performed by any random character. The botched murder of baby Hercules could have been given to undifferentiated goons, Aladdin's escape from the Cave of Wonders requires a flying carpet - but there's no reason for that carpet to be a character.

Two obvious counter-examples here might be Timon and Pumbaa from The Lion King and Lumiere and Cogsworth from Beauty And The Beast, neither of which are directed by Musker & Clements. But although they are both comical double-acts, they differ from the above examples. In the first, Timon and Pumbaa are integral to the narrative; it is their philosophy to life that changes Simba in the second half of the film (it's not about their function in the story, but their personalities). In the other, the two belong to a wider cast of enchanted-object characters, Mrs. Potts most prominent among them. The dynamic is in fact a three-way one, with the more down-to-earth Potts acting as a buffer between the two in their constant bickering. Other examples of the character type - Mushu and Cri-Kee from Mulan and Meeko and Flit from Pocahontas - do serve the same function as in Musker & Clements films, but the films lack the other recurring elements (that I will discuss below).

The other character type is the villain. Now, Disney has a long tradition of famous villains - they've even become their own meta-franchise recently - but these villains are of a very particular type. Modeled mainly on James Bond bad guys, Musker & Clements villains are intelligent, sarcastic, have very specific multi-staged schemes, are obsessed with taking over whatever portion of the world they happen to inhabit (all of 'mousedom', the seas, Agrabah, the cosmos, New Orleans), and very often have some powered-up final form, like a video game boss (Ratigan and Ursula grow in size, Jafar becomes a giant snake, Hades calls upon the hired muscle of the Titans). While Gaston from Beauty And The Beast is clearly the antagonist of the film, he doesn't possess any of the above attributes. Neither does Ratcliffe from Pocahontas, Shan Yu in Mulan, Frollo in The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, or Clayton from Tarzan. Once again, The Lion King seems to give us the exception - Scar fits the bill perfectly, and we have to reiterate the fact that it is not that each of these individual elements are unique to Musker & Clements, but that only they use this exact combination of elements.

But most striking device in the Musker & Clements tool-kit of animation filmmaking is not character types but a particular narrative approach; the two-goal structure. In most Hollywood films, the story is motored by the central character's desire to achieve their goal - to get the girl, to save the world, to find the treasure, to pilot the giant robot. This goal is established early in the film, and then circumstances and antagonistic characters thwart the hero/heroine's attempt to achieve this dream. But in Musker & Clements, the story is propelled by a character attempting to achieve a goal, which they do achieve at around the mid-point of the film, only to find that that goal has been transformed or replaced into a second goal, which now takes over as the focus of the story. Ariel is initially motivated to be a part of the surface world, and she achieves this goal only to have it be replaced by the more pressing goal of getting Eric to fall in love with her. Aladdin's goal in life is to become more than a thief and be a success - which the Genie makes a reality, only for the schemes of Jafar and the heart of Jasmine to take centre-stage. After finding out his true heritage, Hercules is motivated by one thing only: to become a hero. This he does by the film's second act, only for the sultry Meg to change the direction of his attentions. As is probably apparent from these descriptions, the second goal is always that of finding romance.

The Princess And The Frog is probably most overt in this respect, highlighting as its central theme the difference between what you want and what you need. The first goal is always what the character wants, a somewhat short-sighted or superficial desire. Once this has been obtained, its shortcomings become apparent (to the audience if not always the character) and so the second goal of settling down in a heterosexual relationship takes its place as the new, more worthy goal. You might want fame or money or legs, but what you need is the love of a good woman or man. As always, we could argue that The Lion King fits the Musker & Clements bill despite not being a Musker & Clements film. It has a comical double-act, a sarcastic and scheming villain and is very definitely a film of two distinct halves. But Simba has no immediate first goal. Although he certainly wants to be king (he just can't wait for it), he does not need to do anything to achieve this. It is not a goal but an eventuality. Only in the second half of the film does he develop a clear idea about what he needs to do and finds the resolve to do it.

The films of Musker & Clements allows us to see that an authorial stamp does not have to be as obvious as a particular aesthetic or overt thematic concerns, it can take the form of completely mainstream, commonly found elements (which at first appear to be no different to any other film) combined in a particular way to highlight a storytelling preference. John Musker and Ron Clements make their own films featuring comic relief characters that have little bearing on the narrative flow, witty and Machiavellian villains that tend to up the stakes at the finale, and heroes and heroines that pursue slightly selfish ends only to discover the joys of the opposite sex. But they also quite definitely make Disney films

                                                                                                                             - P. S.

Team Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas

To celebrate All Hallow's Eve, this month's post will look at the concept of authorship in relation to a Halloween favourite of many, the misleadingly titled Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas. I'm intending to start a series of posts exploring the complexities of film authorship next month, and so it seemed appropriate to use Tim Burton, the most dubious of film auteurs, as a prologue to this.

In some ways, Burton is a prime example of the initial iteration of the 'auteur', the term Francois Truffaut used to describe a film director whose personal stamp could be seen in the finished film thanks to a recurring set of stylistic and aesthetic motifs. And it's certainly true that one can often identify a Tim Burton film just by looking at it (or even just the poster, in fact). There are certain characteristics that we expect in a Burton film, an almost unconscious checklist that audiences carry in the backs of their brains when going to see one of his films.

Another reason I evoke Truffaut rather than just the general concept of 'authorship' is because, for him, one of the defining features of the Auteur is that they express their personal vision while working within the confines of the Hollywood system. Anyone can make a personal film if they're being funded by an arts council or creating a personal avant-garde piece in their home, but to achieve it while working with a team of hundreds, with studio executives and producers looking over your shoulder, insisting that you make the film as appealing to as wide an audience as possible in order to increase box office revenue - well, that takes a very clear and uncompromising vision, says Truffaut.

Because Burton is very much a Hollywood director with a clear and distinct visual stamp on his films, there would appear to be no reason to describe his authorship as 'dubious'. But this is where Nightmare Before Christmas comes in. Before writing this post, I did a quick search through some message boards and found that to this day - 21 years after the film was released - there are still people who believe that Tim Burton directed Nightmare. The mistake is easy to understand - his name's above the title, after all - but I'm always a little depressed by how little attention people pay to the credits. Do people's brains really just switch off the second the story ends? After Jack and Sally embrace and the camera pulls back, the screen goes black and there - in large white letters - is the phrase 'Directed by Henry Selick'. I'm genuinely baffled by how people can watch the film year after year, and claim to be huge fans of it, and yet not pick up on this.

But the purpose of this post is not to rant about Burton 'stealing credit' from Selick, or how the film is good only because it was directed by Selick instead of Burton (there are plenty of other people doing that on the internet), rather it is to demonstrate that the idea of authorship in film, of identifying a 'personal stamp' in a film, can be far more complicated that we might first think.

It's certainly true that Nightmare is Burton's baby; an idea for a 20 minute television special that he concocted while at Disney, alongside the original Frankenweenie, the utterly bizarre Hansel And Gretel and a host of unrealised projects (two of the most interesting of which would be Trick Or Treat and True Love). The original story and character designs were by Burton and it's here where we can most obviously identify his fingerprints - a tall willowy figure wanting to break away from the confines that society has placed on him, an inherent trait that prevents them from being able to achieve their immediate desire, a host of bizarrely proportioned creatures, architecture with funny angles and a recurring use of black and white stripes and checkerboard patterns.

But the finished film is just over 70 minutes, not 20, and Burton neither expanded the story, wrote the screenplay or directed the action himself. Although we can say that the central theme of the film and the overall aesthetic are his, the idea that any other aspect of the film belongs to Tim Burton the individual becomes a little stretched. First, the original story was adapted by Michael McDowell, whose main output has been writing episodes of horror anthology shows such as Tales From The Darkside, Monsters and Alfred Hitchcock Presents... as well as co-creating and co-writing the screenplay for Burton's Beetlejuice. The shifting of the story into a longer format was the result of McDowell, including the addition of the love story with Sally and the villain Oogie-Boogie. The screenplay itself was written by Caroline Thompson, best known for two other Burton scripts Edward Scissorhands and The Corpse Bride as well as several adaptations of children's literature.

Burton was still involved in the development of his story into full screenplay, but he had now become the 'producer leaning over the shoulder' who Truffaut considered an obstacle that had to be overcome. And we must also take into account Selick's claim that the film was largely improvised during the animation process, using Thompson's script only as a loose guideline. The story is already three-steps removed from Burton and yet, because of the core theme and aesthetics, we can still identify the piece as a Burton work.

But surely it's more accurate to just describe Burton as the 'original author' of the work - in much the same way that Dr. Seuss is the original author of The Lorax but had little to do with the expansion of the story into a feature film (for obvious reasons). Why do we credit Burton for the finished film and not just the initial source material? Part of the reason is because both McDowell and Thompson have worked with Burton before (and after). As writers they have a fairly good understanding of what boxes to tick in order to give something a 'Burton' feel. This, of course, is not authorship but rather a kind of work ethic, a shared idea originated by an individual but executed by many. What we think of as the work of Tim Burton is really the work of the Tim Burton Team, several talented people consciously evoking the expected style.

Another important point worth noting about the expansion of the story: 30 minutes of the film's runtime is taken up with songs (and that's not including reprises). Arguably the film's most important storyteller is Danny Elfman. While in a standard Disney musical, the 70 minutes would contain maybe five or six songs, Nightmare has ten. And while ordinarily the purpose of a musical number is to condense story time - the use of music in 'Part Of Your World' expresses Ariel's emotional state far more succinctly than dialogue alone could - Elfman's songs are largely about expansion. Scenes such as the town meeting or Jack's Christmas experiments could have been half the length if their subject matter were just stated through characters. This is not a criticism (it's not that the songs are 'padding'), it's to emphasise how the story is told more through music and movement than through words.

Elfman is of course a hugely significant factor in the 'Burton feel' of many films, from Beetlejuice to Batman, from Pee-wee's Big Adventure to Big Fish, and the amount of work put into the film by him seals the deal for many that Nightmare must be a Burton film. So, not only is the story the result of four other people in addition to Burton, but the atmosphere created through the soundtrack is also the result of our associating Elfman with the director rather than anything that Burton himself has done. On top of this, there is the 'look' of the film to consider. We have already discussed how the aesthetic elements of the film are recognisably that of Burton - we could take a still from any moment of the film and be able to identify it as coming from his mind. But a film is more than still images, it is about how those images flow together to create movement - the 'look' of Nightmare is just as much about cinematography (the way in which the camera interacts with what's in front of it) as it is about character design.

Selick's personal stamp is most easily seen in the cinematography of the film; the way in which the camera navigates the spaces of the scenes are what most obviously draw comparison with James And The Giant Peach and Coraline. Take the opening sequence, 'This Is Halloween', for example. A casual viewer might only see the 'Burton-ness' of the scene, seeing the curved walls and wonky corners of the streets and buildings, the colourful creatures of Halloween Town, and the atmosphere created by Elfman's song, and make connections with other early films such as Pee-wee and Beetlejuice. But a more canny spectator will look at how the camera moves through the scene, how it skirts passed the scarecrow just as the wind spins it around, how it drifts through the street as each character sings their piece, and most strikingly how it circles around the effigy that reveals itself to be Jack Skellington in his big entrance, and see the hand of Selick at work. One aspect of stop-motion animation that often gets completely taken for granted is that camera movement has to be animated as well. The camera doesn't just float through a scene as animators busily attend to the character models. The movements just described above would have had to have been created frame-by-frame in conjunction with the character animation. This is a level of elaborateness that we often find in Selick but rarely find in Burton.

As this post has already run far longer than I intended it to, I shall quickly reiterate my main point about film authorship: when we think about the look or feel of a particular director's body of work, what we are really thinking of is not a personal vision or expression by some genius individual. Rather it is a collaborative work resulting from several parties all working towards a common artistic goal, a goal that it often shaped by the individual whose name appears above the title, but which is realised by the talents of many artists. When we think about the distinctive 'Guillermo Del Toro look' what we really mean the work of Del Toro's recurring team of designers (Mike Mignola, Wayne Barlowe, etc.) and production crew (such as cinematographer Guillermo Navarro) rather than just the director himself. But much as a band will be overshadowed by their front-man/woman, a film's production crew will often be overshadowed by the single person that we associate with that particular style - even when the person had precious little to do with the actual production of the film.

Happy Halloween!

                                                                                                                             - P. S.